Construction of the Gothic cathedral was part of a massive rearrangement of the urban topography of the east end of the Ile de la Cité. The new cathedral was located substantially to the east of the old principal church, S-Etienne, opening a new space for the parvis to which a new east-west road, the Rue neuve Notre-Dame provided access. The Hôtel Dieu was relocated to the south west of the cathedral and construction broke beyond the limits of the old Roman wall with a new bishop's palace to the south and the new Gothic choir to the east.
Construction of the new cathedral had probably already begun when Pope Alexander III visited Paris in 1163: later written accounts record that he laid the first stone. The work on preparing the foundations (said to be 20-25 feet deep) in this wet soil must have been difficult and lengthy. Work above ground began with the choir and proceeded rapidly: Robert de Thorigny, abbot of Mont-Saint-Michel noted that by 1177 work on the cathedral begun by Bishop Maurice de Sully had advanced rapidly and that the chevet "is already finished, save for its vaults (or roof) (tectorium)." In 1182 the new high altar was consecrated by the papal legate. The nave, built from east to west and directed by a second master mason was certainly begun while the upper choir was under construction. Despite its superficial similarity to the choir, the nave embodies important modifications and innovations. Work on the western frontispiece preceded the westernmost nave bays.
Bishop Maurice de Sully died in 1196 and was replaced by Eudes de Sully: by this time the western frontispiece and upper nave were under construction. The nave was probably substantially complete by around 1210; work continued in the next decades on the upper parts of the western frontipiece and towers: in 1245 it was decided not to erect steeples atop the western towers.
The cathedral was transformed in a series of campaigns beginning in the 1220s. Lateral chapels were added between the culées of the nave; the clerestory windows were extended downwards and the old triforium suppressed and new transept terminals were constructed (Jean de Chelles, d. 1258, on the north and Pierre de Montreuil, d. 1267, on the south. Construction of the lateral chapels around the choir extended into the fourteenth century.

Three levels of interpretation may be entertained. E. E. Viollet-le-Duc, considered the monument a radical breakthrough, a revolt against feudalism and monasticism; expressive of the new creativity of the urban artisan and le génie français. By the mid twentieth century this interpretation had been transformed. Marcel Aubert, Eugène Lefèvre-Pontalis and Jean Bony considered the building as structurally flawed and in need of a prompt structural retrofit (addition of flying buttresses). Jean Bony and Paul Frankl had little to say about Gothic as expressive of French national identity. Most recently scholars (Kimpel, for example) have again returned to the power of Notre-Dame in particular and Gothic in general to represent Frenchness and the extraordinarily innovative nature of this monument. All agree that Notre-Dame participated in and helped form a common language (*koine*) of architecture shared by an extraordinary number of churches in the vicinity and beyond